Why do you need a developer career development plan and how to create one

Have you noticed that planned actions and tasks are completed faster and better? By writing down what needs to be done during the day in a notebook, you are less likely to forget about that task. In addition, transferring it to paper helps to structure thoughts and come to the right decision. Including regarding career plans. Let's imagine this situation: you are finishing your JavaRush training, but you don't know what to do next. You have a certain pool of skills, but lack confidence. A career plan can help in further development. We asked career consultant Elena Ivanchikova about why it was needed, and JavaRush graduates told us whether they had drawn up a career plan.

Why do you need a career plan?

A career plan is a strategy for achieving a desired goal in the form of a specific position or salary. I am convinced that building a conscious career is impossible without a career plan. If a person follows a career without understanding what stages he goes through, such a career is spontaneous. In this situation, you can accept an offer from a company that does not actually coincide with the person’s goals, and make a mistake in choosing the direction of career development. For example, people can develop vertically (a manager's career - ed.) , although if they took time to plan a career plan and think about what they really want and what they have inclinations for, they would prefer a horizontal career (increasing a person's expertise - ed. .) .

What are the career stages?

I am guided by this position in the stages of my career:

• The first stage or preliminary. Lasts up to 25 years. This is the time when a person tries / feels different types of activities and finds the most suitable one for himself.
• The second stage or stage of formation. Lasts up to 30-35 years. At this stage, a person acquires skills. It doesn’t matter what position it occupies and how it develops - horizontally or vertically. He confidently sits in his position and begins to delve into the fine tuning of the profession. This stage includes the maximum amount of training. If at the preliminary stage, a person studied in order to find what he likes, then at this stage he consciously “gains” the knowledge that he lacks.
• The third stage or stage of awareness. Lasts from 30-35 years to 45. Many people call this stage a period of career growth. This is the time when a person clearly and consciously moves along a career path, depending on which one is chosen - either horizontal or vertical. During this period, people are already more confident in their choice: they have already doubted it before, decided on the vector of interest and are moving forward.

  At this stage, a person becomes a confident specialist. This is the self-realization that everyone talks about.

• The fourth stage or stage of logical completion: from 45 to 60 years. A person is gradually completing his career and preparing for retirement. But I want to say that at this stage (about 45 years old) I see a large number of people who undergo career guidance: people understand that they want a new challenge, and their career gets a “second wind”. According to the classification, this is the stage of completion, but I would say that this is the stage of completing a career turn: someone completes it, and someone starts a new one.

However, even taking into account this classification, everything is individual. Someone from their youth understands that they will be a doctor, enters a university and enjoys working as a doctor all their life. Another person may not make up his mind even by the age of 40. I have seen quite a lot of such resumes, when people not only changed companies quite often, but also had a so-called zigzag career, when they constantly changed the vector of development. For example, they could be within one logical category, but within it constantly change specialties.

How to build a career plan

• Plan for no more than 3 years. My recommendation: do not make global strategic goals for a long period. It used to be quite common to set goals for 5-10 years. In the unpredictable world we live in, a career plan should be laid out over three years. To make the goal as precise as possible, I recommend setting the final goal around three years.
• Set intermediate goals and adjust if necessary. When drawing up a career plan, we always have a main global career goal that we set. As a rule, it lasts for 2-3 years, as well as intermediate goals, which we are already focusing on within six months. You can set a goal for each year (out of three years), be it training, be it a new position, or other criteria that are important to you in your career. For example, in the middle of this plan you will realize that you are not moving where you would like. It's okay to change the remaining goals before the end of these three years to suit your new vision.
• Write down a goal using the SMART method . You need to analyze the goal: how relevant, realistic and important it is for you. If you cannot objectively assess the current situation, it is very good to contact a career consultant, mentor, or personal manager who should be interested in your career advancement.
• Don't spray. A specific plan is written for a specific goal. If there are several goals in the plan, there will most likely be a lack of focus. Therefore, one plan - one global goal.
• Set yourself deadlines. It is necessary to set objective deadlines. Do not increase them in order to reach your intended goal on time and do not underestimate it, otherwise you can end up in frustration, complete disappointment and loss of motivation - this happens when you demand a lot from yourself, but forget that there are other tasks in life. As a result, you didn’t have time, your hands give up and you don’t want anything.
• Balance your career plan with other responsibilities. In this case, the career plan will be realistically achieved. Work should not squeeze all the juice out of you, otherwise it will be your first and last career plan.
• When drawing up a career plan, you need to take into account the types of careers. A horizontal career is when we develop within our specialization; it is also called an expert career. A vertical career is a management career when there is a desire and ambition to move up and occupy leadership positions. A zigzag career is a type of career where you change fields to learn something new, often from a related industry. For example, move from sales to marketing.

  To understand what type of career is yours, you need to figure out what motivates you and what is important to you at the current stage of life. This can be financial motivation, when the main criterion for a successful career is a salary that meets your expectations. This may be motivation for self-development, when it is more meaningful for you to develop within the company in your position. Why do people sometimes go into charity projects? Because their motivation in activity is the value of service, that is, the need to help. Understanding your motivation, you will think about what position, in what company and in what area of ​​business you can be most useful to the people around you. This is also an important criterion when drawing up a career plan.

• To determine a person’s value system, I often use Edgar Schein’s “Career Anchors” test in career consultations .

  This test helps determine what a person is focused on in his career. These can be professional competencies, when we want to be an expert in our field. This may be a management orientation, when there are ambitions to manage processes and people. This may be a focus on autonomy and independence - the main criterion for freelancers and people in self-employment, where there are no work schedules and corporate restrictions. This could be a focus on stability, when it is important for an employee to have confidence in the future. Value may lie in service, when it is important for a person to help people and make the world around them better. There is a challenge orientation, when a person likes to walk “on the edge of a knife” and take risks, and, finally, there is an orientation towards entrepreneurship - own business and business. You can take this test to look at your career in a more multifaceted way, from a completely different perspective, and, already understanding your value component, draw up a career plan.

JavaRush Alumni Experience

We asked several JavaRush students if they had a career plan.

Alexander Kopaygorodsky:

My plan looked like this:

1. Understand the theory and gain first skills;
2. Write your first pet project;
3. Find at least some programming-related work to gain commercial experience;
4. Prepare for interviews with large companies;
5. Gain experience in a large company by working there for 2-5 years;
6. Save money while working and open my own business, making a product that I expect to write while working in the company.

The salary growth was not included in the plan. The growth of money is a consequence. The reason lies in how well and how much you can do in a unit of time. What forks are for each programmer level and everyone knows for their region. At first I made $8 an hour, now I make $13 an hour. I looked for my first job for about a year. In the end, he opened a department in the company where he worked at that time. That is, now I’m in the phase of working “at least somewhere as a programmer.”

My career planning tips:

1. Abstract yourself from money. And seriously think about whether you are ready to strain your brain so much every day for at least 10 hours. Programming is a wonderful world that can captivate you, or it can become a nightmare. It depends on whether you like to think a lot and have time to study. If you think about money, force yourself to learn something, find a job, get it, relax, the system will spit you out anyway.
2. Start thinking more specifically about what you want. For example, getting a job in a young promising company, the reward can be very great. Or you will realize that you want stability in a big company so that you can calmly save money by investing in the stock market, real estate, and retire early.

   There is another option for the completely crazy - this is your own business with a group of enthusiasts. Here you are looking for investments, and working on prototypes, and a lot of problems.

3. Combine goals in your plan. After looking at my plan, you will see my combination, make your own.

Dima Mersiyanov:

Initially, I had a plan to start making money doing what I liked, that is, programming. The idea was to find a company with a team where you can learn, and then in a couple of years move up the developer career ladder with increasing income. I was looking for my first job for about 3 months. Somewhere they refused me, somewhere I refused when I realized that the company had no prospects even for a junior developer. When looking for my first job as a programmer, I wanted to earn no less than my salary as a tester, which was about $1,000. After 5 attempts, I managed to find such a company and get an interview there. Then every year I set myself a goal to increase my earnings by a certain percentage and think about how to strengthen my competence in the field in order to qualify for a salary increase. In a couple of years, my salary has increased several times. My advice when drawing up a career plan: do not chase money, but try to get maximum experience even for little money; after 1-2 years of work it will pay off.

Misha Krokhmal:

My plan for learning programming was for a year. When I finished my studies, I was looking for work as both a front-end and back-end developer. I went to interviews both in my hometown and in Kyiv, and eventually got my first job in my city. If I hadn’t gotten a job then, the money would have been enough for 2 months at most. There were such thoughts: either I find a job, or I start living in debt. But it took a little over a month to find my first job. After 2.5 years, I changed jobs, and a year later, I accepted an offer for the position of senior in a Kyiv company. When planning my career development, I expected that I would be able to reach the maximum salary for my position in 4-5 years. At that time, for my city it was 3 thousand dollars, for Kyiv - 4 thousand dollars. I will evaluate whether I have achieved this goal in a year: according to the plan, this will be the 5th year of my career. If I don't achieve it, I'll reconsider my plan. So far everything is going as it should. My salary started at 200 dollars, because I didn’t know much, the next month I was paid 300 bucks. Now I get 2800 bucks. My plan was a little disrupted, because I expected to work in my hometown for only a year, and then move to Kyiv. But I managed to stay longer in the first company because there were interesting projects and a good team. I believe that sometimes you can sacrifice a plan for the sake of your comfort and quality development.

My career planning tips:

1. Get as much experience as possible in your first years. I don't recommend changing jobs too often in the beginning. I have friends who had 8 jobs on their resume in 2 years. As practice shows, this did not end well. In the first few years, it is better to focus on gaining experience and working on good projects.
2. Don't stop studying and planning. It turned out that I started looking for a job a little earlier, after 9 months of training, and gradually records were added to the plan about where I submitted my resume, where I had interviews, and similar information. Then I began to write down training plans while working, and after 2.5 years, again looking for a new job, and so on in a circle.